‘Dog Days’ Is Centerpiece of Prototype Festival

For new music, the main difficulty isn’t getting a premiere. It’s getting a second performance, and a third, and a fourth, the repetitions necessary for a piece really to enter the cultural bloodstream.

That hasn’t been a problem for the acclaimed opera “Dog Days,” a post-apocalyptic family drama based on a short story by Judy Budnitz. It was first performed in 2012 at Montclair State University in New Jersey, to strong reviews — “a taut, nuanced work that clawed beneath the surface of every situation,” Steve Smith wrote in The New York Times — and has since toured to Fort Worth and Los Angeles, with two new productions planned for Germany in 2016.

Robert Woodruff’s original staging has now finally reached New York, where it opens Jan. 9 for three performances at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. The run, conducted by Alan Pierson, is the centerpiece of Prototype: Opera/Theater/Now, an invaluable annual festival of contemporary chamber opera and performance.

'Dog Days'CreditVideo by Noah Stern Weber

But though the creators of “Dog Days” — the composer David T. Little and the librettist Royce Vavrek — are deeply associated with the city’s music scene, the piece isn’t exactly coming home.

“I live in New Jersey, so it was sort of starting home,” Mr. Little said with a laugh in a phone interview. “But bringing it to New York is always something we wanted to do.”

Anchored by intense performances from Lauren Worsham (nominated for a Tony Award in 2014 for “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder”) and the performance artist John Kelly, the plot is pushed to disturbing extremes by Mr. Little’s propulsive, eclectic, sometimes earsplitting score. “There’s lots of rock ’n’ roll and metal in the piece,” said Mr. Pierson, who is also leading “The Last Hotel” as part of Prototype. “There’s musical theater. There’s the operatic tradition.”

During rehearsals for the 2012 premiere in Montclair, Mr. Little recalled, the ambiguous but utterly devastating event at the heart of the story felt far away — if not unthinkable, then at least hypothetical. But then, a month later, Hurricane Sandy hit.

“It became really evident that we were not that far from these sorts of disasters,” Mr. Little said. “In the past few years, things have been frightening,” he added. “So to explore survival in the wake of very frightening events, I can’t imagine it’s not something that people think about.”